Large projects that involve many different documents sourced with different document creation and editing tools usually involve teams of contributors, reviewers, and editors. It is common for such teams to include members who are located in separate locations, often in separate cities or even countries. To effectively associate these dispersed contributors, documents typically provide carefully placed hyperlinks that are intended to facilitate a user jumping from one document to another to preserve context. Preserving cross-document links in such a multi-user multi-domain document creation and development environment is quite challenging as disconnected users may edit, delete, replace, and otherwise impact files that link to each other. Additionally, file format differences may make it challenging to ensure links redirect the user efficiently.
For specific applications such as submission of documents to government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), additional requirements related to submitted file format, document storage hierarchy, link validity and the like impose additional challenges. These requirements and multi-domain file maintenance challenges suggest that there is a need for efficient and comprehensive document viewing, creation, management and validation of intra-document and inter-document links for source documents comprising a variety of source file formats across local, relative, cloud-based, and physical file storage systems.